India Web Traffic and Spammers

I noticed that in Alexa, Wizzley is ranking for India and showing the most traffic from India.

My traffic, on the other hand, is showing 78% US-based traffic.

I've noticed that when US-based sites start showing up in Alexa as having primarily Indian traffic, it's often a first sign or red flag that goes up before the site becomes overrun with spam.

I also have noticed an increase in spam accounts and spamming behavior, over the past six months or so.  For example, I've reported as spam, a few users who have favorited me.  I see they were promptly deleted.

I guess my question is this: why is the traffic from Wizzley shifting over to India, and what can we do about it?  I'm concerned about the decline of the site.  I see in Alexa that the site-wide traffic to Wizzley has also declined, although my traffic to my pages is still staying strong.  I just want to make sure that we're staying on top of things.

You're correct, we get a lot of spam "authors" from India. I delete them every morning, while I have my first cup of coffee. Google won't even see those pages.

I don't know what else we could do about this, Alex. 

chefkeem I think you are doing a great job keeping the spammers until control. If I get up early I see those guys' Wizzles and they are gone very quickly. 

Indian spammers are everywhere. I think Wizzley is doing better than most sites at keeping them in check. You're also doing a better job at most at keeping the standards here high. I've heard from people trying to write here from other sites where the controls aren't as strict. They haven't last very long because of the high standards. 

Thank you, Digby. 

I've given up on trusting Alexa for anything because my own site has had around 50% increase in traffic over the past 2 months. Which is clearly seen on quantcast. However, on alexa I dropped 11 Million ranks... And I was not in the millions to begin with lol.

Maybe not as many people who use the alexa toolbar are visiting, hence the drop here on Wizzley too.

Thanks, Chefkeem, for the blocking of spam. 

I really do appreciate the spam control here.  It is much better than so many similar sites, and that's why I publish here and not on most of these other sites.

I do think you all are right too, about not being able to trust Alexa's data very much.

I think they are pretty accurate when you're looking at the top 1000 sites or so, but I can't imagine they'd have enough data to say much about the smaller sites.  I also have noticed them being pretty far off about my own sites.  I have one site that is ranked under 300,000 globally and they grossly over-estimate the amount of traffic from India to that site--they say it's 24.8%, whereas my Google Analytics data (which I trust more) says 5.92%.

Perhaps the same is true about Wizzley?

I wish Wizzley was registered on www.quantcast.com that would be cool. 

You must be doing a good job, as I have seen almost none from India.